Sen. Reid orders new inquiry into CIA's computer monitoring

Published 6:04 pm, Thursday, March 20, 2014

CIA Director John Brennan, left, was ordered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to ensure interaction between CIA personnel and Senate staff was only through the Senate sergeant at arms.

CIA Director John Brennan, left, was ordered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to ensure interaction between CIA personnel and Senate staff was only through the Senate sergeant at arms.

Photo: Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press

Sen. Reid orders new inquiry into CIA's computer monitoring

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Washington --

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has ordered the Senate's chief law enforcement officer to conduct a forensic examination of top-secret computers used for a study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program, escalating an unprecedented battle over legislative oversight of the spy agency.

In a letter sent Wednesday to CIA Director John Brennan, Reid repeated allegations that the CIA conducted three unauthorized searches of the computers on which staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed millions of pages of top-secret documents and began drafting the still-unreleased study.

"You are no doubt aware of the grave and unprecedented concerns with regard to constitutional separation of powers this action raises," wrote Reid, who also labeled as "patently absurd" Brennan's allegation that the staffers had "hacked" into classified CIA computer networks.

In a separate letter also sent Wednesday, Reid urged Attorney General Eric Holder to have the Justice Department "carefully examine" what Reid called an apparent CIA bid to intimidate the committee by seeking a criminal investigation of the staff's alleged unauthorized penetration of agency computer networks.

Reid's two letters represent the latest shots fired in a power struggle between the Democrat-controlled Senate and the CIA ignited by the sweeping four-year, 6,300-page study of the CIA's use under the Bush administration of water boarding and other harsh interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorists held in secret "black site" prisons overseas.

In his letters to Brennan and Holder, Reid said that he had instructed the Senate sergeant-at-arms to initiate a "forensic examination" of the computers and a computer network that the CIA "assigned for the exclusive use" of the committee staff.

The examination would be to determine how a copy of a highly classified internal CIA review of the interrogation program ended up in the staff's network, he wrote.

He asked Brennan to "take whatever steps necessary" to ensure there is no further interaction between CIA personnel and Senate staff other than with Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance W. Gainer, a veteran police officer who commands the Senate's security force of nearly 1,000.

The sergeant-at-arms investigation is the third formal inquiry into the dispute.

The CIA general counsel's office asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into the alleged unauthorized removal of classified materials by the committee staff, a matter that the FBI is now examining. CIA Inspector General David Buckley, meanwhile, asked the department to launch a criminal probe into the alleged unauthorized intrusion by CIA personnel into the committee's computers.

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